Category: School of AI

Willian Ver Valem Paiva has come a long way—both geographically, and in his career. He’s gone from Brazil to France, via Ireland, and he’s recently landed an incredible new role as a Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer at a start-up in Bordeaux.

Growing up in Sao Paulo, Willian spent hours working out how to program his computer. It became his passion, and he knew he wanted a career working with computers. When he started looking at universities, he found he simply couldn’t afford the expensive fees to pursue a computer science program in Brazil. What he found instead was a company that would sponsor him to study engineering. It wasn’t the subject he loved, but at least it was a degree program. Within a few years however, he realized he’d made the wrong choice, so he did something very bold. He emptied his savings, left his program, and got on a plane.

Companies are getting serious about artificial intelligence across a wide range of industries, and innovators in finance and trading have been notable early adopters. As detailed in The Wall Street Journal, “investors now have at their fingertips an expanding ocean of data about the global economy and financial data, such as changes in earnings estimates and accounts receivable.” Traders who can leverage data and technology, including artificial intelligence, are gaining significant ground accordingly:

“Quantitative hedge funds are now responsible for 27% of all U.S. stock trades by investors, up from 14% in 2013.”

Udacity and WorldQuant partner to launch the Artificial Intelligence for Trading Nanodegree program

Our research found that there is massive interest in learning how to build financial models for trading, particularly among data analysts, software engineers, and programmers with Python skills. This is why we’re so excited to announce our new Artificial Intelligence for Trading Nanodegree program! We’re especially pleased to have partnered with WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm, to build this program, as it brings together our groundbreaking learning platform with one of the true pioneers in the quantitative trading space.

Enroll today in the new Deep Reinforcement Learning Nanodegree program!

The world of Artificial Intelligence offers a wealth of opportunity for those interested in the field, and the applications of this transformational technology are so wide-reaching that there are virtually no limits to the paths you might pursue. Udacity’s School of Artificial Intelligence offers a range of learning opportunities to support your particular interests and aspirations, and today, we are excited to officially open our new Deep Reinforcement Learning Nanodegree program for enrollment!

Udacity’s Robotics and AI teams present “Learning Robotics on the Jetson TX2”—an opportunity to build a robot, and use reinforcement learning to make it perform!

Members of Udacity’s Robotics and AI teams were invited to present a session at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference on Wednesday. The session, entitled “Learning Robotics on the Jetson TX2,” provided attendees with the opportunity to actually wire up and run a real robot! Here’s the official session description:

Learning Robotics on the Jetson TX2

Are you ready to learn how to use your Jetson TX2 for robotics applications? Join AI and Robotics instructors from Udacity in this lab which will teach you how to get started using your TX2 to apply AI to your robotics application. You will get the chance to build a simple “Lights Out” robot that will use reinforcement learning to push buttons and turn out corresponding LEDs. We will cover how to wire up, program, and run the robot. Additionally, we will discuss the basics of applied reinforcement learning.

As world-changing new technologies continue to emerge and develop, each with the potential to advance our world in ways we can hardly yet imagine, Udacity’s mission to deliver the best learning experience possible for every aspiring learner on the planet takes on a new depth of purpose, and a greater breadth of focus.

Announcements at Intersect 2018

When Udacity CEO Vish Makhijani took the Intersect 2018 stage to welcome attendees to the conference, he had exciting Udacity news to share. He highlighted new and expanded industry partnerships—and the creation of the KUKA Udacity Robot Learning Lab at KIT—that will enable our global robotics students to run their code on real robots in a real robotics lab. He introduced Udacity Universe, a large-scale simulated world where students can move beyond single-vehicle autonomy, and start exploring systems thinking, fleet management, and smart city planning. He presented the new School of AI, which offers a comprehensive learning experience covering everything from Python programming and algorithm fundamentals to computer vision and natural language processing specializations. And he announced the launch of a new WeChat Nanodegree Program where students can master the skills to build “mini-programs” on the WeChat platform. Tencent will provide 1 million RMB in scholarship funds for students in China who wish to take this program.